A STORY INTERPRETATION OF THE SOCIO-ECONOMIC THEORY.EXAMPLE OF AN INTERVENTION- RESEARCH IN A THEATER COMPANY

Abstract

This paper is aimed at interpreting socio-economic organizational change phenomena through the lens of a storytelling approach. This approach calls for the mediation of competing stories in order to bring together diverging mindsets. A common practice in organizational storytelling is to select a few episodes that fit into a narrative meant to represent the protagonists’ shared experience, but this approach often ignores the underlying social and economic dynamics within the firm. Our aim then is to show how the interweaving of story fragments produced by organizational actors at all echelons and departments of a firm during a socio-economic intervention provides a window into the messier reality of the workplace and opens up new spaces of organizational change inquiry. Drawing on Savall’s socio-economic intervention-research methodology, Boje’s antenarrative theory and Savall and Zardet’s concept of “contradictory intersubjectivity”, we demonstrate the way fieldnote quotes gathered during a socio-economic diagnosis at a theater company acted as story fragments called antenarratives, enabling the managers, actors and the theater staff to reconcile their respective visions of the theater’s future and the role of each in that future.